P A Swans / General Motor Skills

by Yellow Swans

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	1.	I'm Not Sorry If You Never Sleep 09:51
	2.	Targets: Aerobic 04:19
	3.	Ex SS 07:48
	4.	03 07:23

about

GMS:
When Pete and I started playing music again this year after a pretty long hiatus we both were thinking the same thing: “sounds like us.” It’s hard to say what that actually means, especially cause it also sounded very different. We're using some different instruments, we’ve both had over a decade of listening and playing music separately… but when we jammed it sounded like Yellow Swans. Part of this archival project has been focused on surfacing obscure, old, rare, and even not-that-great music in order to give anyone who’s interested a more complete picture of our project. This is the first thing we ever put together - a cdr in some stupid limited edition (15?) made for our first West Coast “tour” down to the Bay Area (see “Live at Kimo’s”) - and listening back to it, it’s weird how much it “sounds like us.”

Granted… it’s raw, and wonky, and there’s a lot of elements that we moved on from pretty quickly (electro/hip hop style drum patterns, dual vocals, fairly unprocessed guitars). There's also a weird glam/camp humor at play that was there at the band's beginning but is hard to explain if you weren't there. If you see really old photos of us you'll see us in glitter and lace gear designed by our fashonista friends at Seaplane. We had performance personas, so the names in the title are these sort of nom-de-guerres that we tried out and mostly ditched. The recording also has some raw elements… very RAW elements … that still show up later on in our sound, even in our recent rehearsals. It's a mix of punk, industrial, hip hop, and avant-garde influences, only bare naked floating right on the surface rather than fully submerged in the oceanic murk.

Is it “good”... I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. If there’s an “A-Z” of Yellow Swans, here’s the “A”. Recorded live to mini-disc, in a Wobblie-run anarchist cafe and a punk house basement, both in Portland, Oregon in January 2002.

credits

released April 1, 2002

Tracks 1 & 2 live @ Red and Black Cafe, 1-12-02.
Tracks 3 & 4 Live @ The Dogg Pound, 1-5-02.
All live in Portland, OR, USA.

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Yellow Swans Portland, Oregon

From their 2001 founding to the duo’s final shows (and subsequent hiatus) in 2008, Gabriel Mindel Saloman and Pete Swanson aka Yellow Swans carved an influential path through America’s experimental music underground, at the axis of noise, psychedelia, industrial, drone, and hardcore. Their music is restless, ragged, and forever in flux, untethered and unresolved. ... more

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